Posted
by
Unknown Lamer
on Monday September 17, 2012 @09:11PM
from the for-the-queen dept.

`puddingebola writes "A report in the journal Nature Neuroscience (paywalled) says scientists have observed epigenetic markers in bees that correspond to their roles in the society. From the article, 'Honeybees are born into their place in society. Those fed royal jelly as larvae emerge as queens and do little but lay eggs. The rest become worker bees and divvy up the jobs that need doing around the hive. While some worker bees remain at home, others take flight in search of nectar, pollen and other hive essentials. The entire honeybee workforce are genetically identical sisters. But analysis of the worker bees' DNA revealed that foragers had one pattern of chemical tags on their genes, while those that stayed home had another. When bees swapped one job for the other, their genetic tags changed accordingly.'"

As a non-American I have a very hard time to tell Mitt Romney apart from the mock politicians on the GTA radio channels.Why would anyone ever want to vote for someone who openly says that he is going to funnel tax-money to his cronies?

"Alpha children wear grey. They work much harder than we do, because they're so frightfully clever.... "

I wonder what percentage of those reading this get the reference?

It was almost a whoosh for myself, before realizing the reference to Brave New World. I thought the post was referring to the American High School Student IQ Classification system. Based on intelligence tests and grades, students were segregated into one of three mental levels -- above average, average and below average -- the difficulty and demands of the subject matter being simplified accordingly.

The secretive system was meant to be kept from the parents and students; any discussions about the studen

Clearly you were below average, because it's was QUITE obvious what "level" a student was at due to the labeling of the classes: "accelerated or AP" at the top end and "remedial" at the bottom end. Everything else was average. Grammar school is a bit more segregated and harder to get on or off a given track since you tended to have all of your classes with the same group.

And it's not some conspiracy as to why the wealthier kids end up at the top. Well educated people tend to have more money and tend to valu

Problem with Brave New World, 1984, THX-1138 and other dystopias is that no society like that would ever emerge. People won't allow themselves to be suppressed so readily. Instead you have to TRICK the people into believing their suppression is actually freedom & democracy. For example:

- Convincing people that private profits and shared losses is a good thing. - When the rich corporate managers "win" they get to keep the money for themselves, but when they "lose" then the loss is spread across the entire taxpayer base. (TARP and Stimulus Bills and QE1/2/3 are what I'm talking about.) Many people actually believe making the workers bear the burden of the loss is a good thing!

Somehow I fail to see how my losing ~$15,000 funding Goldman Sachs and Solyndra with free cash is benefiicial for me, but millions of other people think it is. That's a True dystopia. Rob from the poor/middle incomes and give to the rich.

Somehow I fail to see how my losing ~$15,000 funding Goldman Sachs and Solyndra with free cash is benefiicial for me, but millions of other people think it is.

Millions of other people aren't gullible enough to believe either of these were given any free cash, or that they've lost $15,000 in loans to Goldman Sachs and Solyndra. Goldman Sachs has long since paid back the money it was loaned, costing citizens absolutely nothing, in fact earning them a bit of interest, and the total cost of Solyndra will come to less than $2 per citizen at worst (which was already spent before the loan was given -- Congress knew when it loaned money to several dozen companies specul

buying a home on credit, or using it as equity to get credit, is an investment, a gamble that its value wont change significantly other than to maybe go up. like other investments, its subject to market changes. you assume that risk willingly by buying the house. really everything is essentially an investment, it's just the degree to which other people also want said item. and some people dont use their homes for credit, and dont intend to sell, content to stay so for them its less of an investment (gamble)

You bet on a house. You lost.
The reason it was a bad bet isn't necessarily the government's fault, but they could have done more to keep the bubble from forming and alleviating the problem afterwards.
But no one owes it to you to "make you whole".

The reason that the government stepped in to help the financial market is because it would have taken down the government with it. The reason it made a bet on solar power is because it would enrich everyone.

>>>or that they've lost $15,000 in loans to Goldman Sachs and Solyndra

Thanks for demoing how easily people are duped. Solyndra went out of business (as did almost all the other green companies that received loans). That money is GONE and the taxpayers will never get it back. As for Goldman & other banks they still exist but they also still owe the U.S. Treasury (i.e. the taxpayers' treasury) trillions of dollars.

And no TARP was not paid back. I wish people would stop repeating that myth. A

Somehow I fail to see how my losing ~$15,000 funding Goldman Sachs and Solyndra with free cash is benefiicial for me, but millions of other people think it is. That's a True dystopia. Rob from the poor/middle incomes and give to the rich.

Well, it's obvious: the rich will be able to invent new plastic toy! Poor won't be able to buy it, but who cares, it's progress!

Taks transcribed to DNA. Hmm. This doesn't sound all that far from a mechanism that could transcribe thoughts... primitive or otherwise... back into DNA to be passed to offspring. Much like the concept of inherited behaviors actually, which clearly exist. We could explain inherited behavior by random selection... higher mortality of individuals not exhibiting the behavior... but that would be awfully slow compared to a mechanism that could pass learned behaviors to offspring. And such a mechanism would give

Tasks are not! transcoded to DNA; this is NOT an exception to the central dogma of molecular biology [wikipedia.org]. The epigenome is RNA and protein and smaller signaling molecules; the DNA sequence itself is untouched, and nothing happens to the deoxy-ribose sugar backbone.

Think of it as the metadata getting changed, not the code - a differing pattern of lines of code being commented out.

It doesn't have to be recombined; gene regulation happens rather a lot within the individual lifespan. And it also (it's really complicated) tends to influence how often the code is transcribed, rather than how it is transcribed, though there's edge cases like white blood cells where they actually splice out chunks of their DNA to see if they can make an antibody that is potentially useful - instead of cels that target your pancreas (and would otherwise cause diabetes) simply self-destructing, they try to

"Chromosomal regions can adopt stable and heritable alternative states resulting in bistable gene expression without changes to the DNA sequence. Epigenetic control is often associated with alternative covalent modifications of histones.[23] The stability and heritability of states of larger chromosomal regions are often thought to involve positive feedback where modified nucleosomes recru

I missed this when I responded to Godzilla first, but this is exactly the right track - and unless I misread the original story, exactly what's going on here. If it's working on the principle of modified nucleosomes being autocatalytic, it's operating on a fairly coarse, chunky level, however.

Whoa, a little aggressive there. (Did Crick actually have it right when he called it dogma?) As noted below, according to [wikipedia.org]epigenetics, "Conclusive evidence supporting epigenetics show that these mechanisms can enable the effects of parents' experiences to be passed down to subsequent generations." So I erred in speculating about DNA transcription, but otherwise the idea already seems partially validated. According to Wikipedia[tm].

Crick didn't really have it right when he called it dogma. I think the consensus as of six months ago was somewhere between "Central Dogma is a theory" and "Central Dogma should have been called Central Theory". The fact that they went back and had to revise it when HIV and reverse-transcriptase were discovered means that it never really was dogma in the literal sense.

And I probably did come on stronger than is polite. I'm sorry about that, I was trying to be unambiguous in a post written in 60 second

The point is well taken: in this context, DNA stays constant while heritable changes to expression take place. Which makes some kind of intuitive sense, like the charge in a memory cell changing while the transistor connections do not. And which seems plausible as a means of encoding heritable memories. Barging on from there: perhaps one day somebody will get a Nobel prize for discovering the "memory code" just as Crick did for the genetic code.

Awesome metaphor! You're generally spot on - DNA base sequence is untouched / nothing happens to the phosphate backbone / epigenetics is all about controlling which genes are made into proteins - but to be nitpicky, an important epigenetic phenomenon which is probably also operating here is DNA methylation [wikipedia.org]. DNA is directly modified in a way which alters the pattern in which genes are expressed, is fairly long-term for the cell and is heritable by future generations of cells in the organism (i.e. epigenetica

You got it right with DNA methylation - and there's also acetylation, which I forgot to mention as well. Thank you for catching me on that. The two can be generally described as up-regulating (acetylation) and down-regulating (methylation) the expression of that patch of DNA. Wikipedia has a nice overview of it here, [wikipedia.org] which helpfully points out that it's the histones - "spindle" molecules that are acetylated, to allow easier access to the DNA for increased transcription.

Well, if we're talking histone modifications there are a few more types (phosphorylation, ubiquitylation, sumoylation, biotinylation). I was talking about direct methylation of the DNA molecule, though, not histones. Have a read of the link in my last post.

I was just being pedantic - I couldn't help pointing out that the epigenome isn't just RNA and protein; epigenetics sometimes does involve chemical modification of DNA itself mainly in imprinting [wikipedia.org]. It wasn't really that relevant to the point you were makin

This is epigenetic. That is, the genes aren't being altered. What is being altered is the pattern of which genes are on and off--which proteins are being expressed. What's impressive here is that the change is so big and capable of reversals.

Whenever I need to completely switch gears from one project to the next (like going from Drupal into Zend Framework), I will require at least two weeks of downtime (although I would never dare admit to it to my manager). It's unavoidable. It's like my brain is jammed between channels and no matter how much I beat the horse, it will be this way while my neurons rearrange themselves. Then, one sunny day, bing it's all realigned and reprogrammed and I'm off to the productive races.

Epigenetics is not about the DNA sequence itself, but rather about how the DNA is managed and accessed. Generally it refers to the protein that helps to condense the DNA and make some parts more accessible than others. Really the more noticeable change would be in their RNA, which is the sequence of expressed genes.

Basically if your genome is a tape library, RNA is your local hard drive, which is pulling files as needed from the tape library. Your system RAM is, of course, protein.

Uh, DNA would be the HDD, RNA would be the RAM, and proteins would be the opcodes currently being processed.
The analogy breaks down at a lot of points. Like RNA not changing during runtime like RAM, and the protein being "processed" by a massively distributed an pipe-lined network of biological cells rather than a digital chip... but you're right about the OS consisting of material previous retrieved and expressed DNA.

A Hive is not identical sisters. There are usually 3 to 5 males who mated with the Queen, so there are factions which are more closely related and they try to elevate their Queen larvae when the time comes to create a new Queen. Also, even the sisters with the same 2 parents are not genetically identical, they still have the usual mix of traits from both parents from when the egg was fertilized.

Worker bees in a hive are not geneticially identical, nor are they all sisters in the usual sense of the word. Queen bees are typically multiply mated during a mating flight and store sperm for life. Male bees develop from unfertilized eggs and they only have one set of chromosomes which each of their offspring inherits in full. Pairs of worker bees therefore either have the same father so they share on average 75% of their genes, or they have different fathers so that they share 25% of their genes.

I wouldn't be surprised if iPhone users have mutated chemical tags too. Look for the "religious" gene first, and don't forget to check the "fashion-victim", "metrosexual softie" and "RDF-sensititvity" genes, then verify that the "die-hard technologist" gene is turned off.

You guys understand the brain bugs in Starship Troopers, bred whenever a problem needed magical solving, and the engineers in The Mote in God's Eye, were both sarcastic commentary about highly intelligent science and engineering knuckling under to let political idiots run the show and tell them what to do.

See also A Deepness In the Sky. Or parts of Atlas Shrugged, for that matter.